by Larry Loftis
German military police, the captain told the madam. They were looking for an army deserter, he said, and would be conducting a room-to-room search.
Moments later they were standing before room 10.
* * *
9. A traditional wooden sailboat commonly used in the Mediterranean.
10. Including Major George Starr, organizer of the WHEELWRIGHT circuit; Marcus Bloom, radio operator for the PRUNUS circuit; Mary Herbert, courier for the SCIENTIST circuit; and Marie-Thérèse Le Chene, courier for the PLANE circuit.
11. A former French naval attaché in London. Prior to the arrest of Peter’s predecessor, Francis Basin, Baron de Malval had allowed Basin to use Villa Isabelle as the circuit’s headquarters.
12. Each brothel contained a notice stating whether it was requisitioned for German soldiers or “open to civilian gentlemen.”
13. In Holland, these raids—the razzia, they called them—were conducted in neighborhoods to snatch young men between sixteen and thirty.
CHAPTER 4
THE BRIEFCASE
Strange, Peter thought. Odette should have been back by now. He was concerned but not overly worried; she had an iron will, after all, and he was confident she could handle most any situation. She’d be back in the morning, he told himself.
By eleven o’clock the next day, though, she had yet to arrive. He sent lookouts to meet all of the inbound Marseille trains and then left for a meeting with Carte.
When he returned, Arnaud was waiting.
“Where’s Lise?”
Peter feigned unconcern. “Search me.”
“Where did you send her?”
“Marseille.”
Arnaud scowled. “Fancy sending her to that —— pit of Sodomy before she’s had time to catch her breath.”
“What d’you expect me to do with her? Stick her in a glass case? If she were my courier she’d have to go wherever I sent her.”
“You’re a callous bastard,” Arnaud bellowed. “I always knew it.”
He stomped out, slamming the door so hard that a picture fell from the wall.
Peter poured a glass of wine and drained it. He tried to tell himself he’d made the right decision in sending her to Marseille, but his conscience haunted him. Remember when you were there last January . . . Remember that raid when they cordoned off the street . . . Remember all those women and children they hustled off to Germany . . . Remember the French police they trapped at the stadium and sent off . . . Remember how those spivs shook you down for twenty-five thousand in a backstreet . . . This is the gay resort from which Lise has not yet returned.
He went to the window and checked the time: 6:25 P.M. There were two more trains for the day: the 7:53 and the 11:37. He arrived at the station at 7:48 and relieved the lookout. The train was on time, and he strained to examine every face as passengers streamed through the gate.
No Lise.
He had no appetite for dinner, so he biked back to the flat and wrote a report to London about his visit with Carte. Dealing with the zealous circuit leader was delicate, to say the least. On the one hand, Carte had a vast organization which covered much of Vichy France and penetrated even parts of the occupied zone. He also had at his disposal, he claimed, a band of some three hundred thousand guerillas which could be brought to bear at the appropriate hour.
On the other hand, Carte was overbearing, arrogant, and lacked all notions of security. He kept in his study a list of more than two hundred agents in his network, including names, addresses, descriptions, telephone numbers, experience, specialties, and, in some cases, photographs. If that wasn’t enough, Carte didn’t like Arnaud and wanted nothing to do with him. In short, Peter warned London, Carte was going to be a problem.
The distraction of preparing the message lasted only minutes, and for the next two and a half hours Peter agonized over Lise. Was Arnaud right? Had he given her too much, too fast? He headed back to the station and joined the crowd waiting for the 11:37. Chain-smoking, he paced back and forth before the luggage office.
The crowd murmured at the rumble of the train and Peter slid to the back to have a full view of the platform and exit. As the first disembarking passengers hurried through, he scanned them. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, traipsed past but no Lise. After a few minutes he was about the only one left; two or three stragglers, and then the area was clear.
His mouth went dry and he put his hand against the wall to steady himself. “Oh, God,” he muttered, “give me strength.”
He passed his eyes across the platform one last time and there, dragging the large suitcase, was Lise. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he slipped through the shadows and came up behind her, snatching the case and putting his arm through hers. Odette jumped, and then relaxed with a tired smile.
They went to a restaurant still open—the Chez Robert—and over a midnight dinner, Odette recounted the trip. She told him about the men she escorted to Marseille, and the one who lost his nerve and returned to Cannes. She moved on to picking up the suitcase and meeting Vidal, followed by the surprise visit of Bernard.
Next came the brothel story, followed by the harrowing events later that night. The place had been raided by the German military police, she said, and she was saved from having her room breached only by the quick-thinking madam. When the police arrived at room 10, the woman told them that it was occupied by her niece, who was suffering from smallpox. It worked, and the police moved on.
Peter didn’t comment on her incredible bad luck with the raid or ask why it took so long for her to return. He congratulated her on a first-rate job and asked how she liked working in Cannes.
“Cannes has nothing to do with the real France,” Odette said, “the France I came to find. I expected a hard, resentful, smouldering France, and I came to live and work in that France. It is my misfortune that I came to the one bit of my country where the war doesn’t go on. I wanted very much to be with my true compatriots and to fight the Germans.”
She paused and then added: “But if you ask me if I like working in your group and with you, the answer is ‘yes.’ I think that you work very hard and I know that I could do much of that work and leave you free to get on with the more important things.”
He asked if she liked Cannes in general and she said she didn’t.
“It’s easy and silky and sophisticated. I am none of those things. The thing I seek is reality—and I don’t think it is to be found in this . . . this decadent sunshine. Please don’t think that when I use the word ‘reality’ I mean danger. I don’t particularly want to get into danger. If I did, I should be weak and frightened. I am far better at blowing little girls’ noses for them than sleeping in Marseille brothels. I am a much better cook than I am a British agent. I prefer bouillabaisse to Bren guns. I am a very ordinary woman.”
Peter said he disagreed. “No very ordinary woman would have set out along the Corniche on a completely unfamiliar bicycle, fallen off, cut her best silk stockings and her knees to ribbons—and completed her journey. Why didn’t you tell me that you didn’t know how to ride?”
Because, she replied, he seemed to take for granted that everybody was as competent as he was. “It is most irritating.”
Peter shook his head and admired his angry gazelle. One in a million.
“Lise, this Auxerre business, why don’t you drop it and stay here?”
Odette said she wanted to be in a place of action, like Marseille, but even if she agreed to stay in Cannes, London would never approve it. Peter said it was up to her but that with her and Arnaud on his team, there’d be no stopping them.
Odette again mentioned London, saying she’d bet anything they’d never allow it.
Peter grinned. He’d played this game before. He said he’d take her bet.
“How much?” Odette asked.
“Fifty thousand.”
“Make it one hundred thousand.”
Peter agreed and had Arnaud send the request. The following day, London replied:
&n
bsp; SEND LISE TO AUXERRE AS ORIGINALLY PLANNED STOP SURELY CARTE CAN PROVIDE MEANS OF CROSSING DEMARCATION LINE.
Peter sent an immediate response—LISE INDISPENSABLE—and met with Odette that afternoon. He said that she had won the bet, but would she give him another twenty-four hours?
She agreed.
The following day, Arnaud brought London’s reply:
OH VERY WELL.
SPINDLE was set. Peter had his handpicked team—Arnaud and Odette—and the pair now officially owed him 150,000 francs. The danger, he realized, was that his affection for Odette could impair his judgment, something he’d have to be vigilant to watch.
Paris
March 1943
WHILE THE SPINDLE TEAM was being approved by London, the Germans were preparing a formidable counter.
Sergeant Hugo Bleicher was amazed that he had become somewhat of a celebrity among the Geheime Feldpolizei—German Secret Police—operating in France. Throughout the Gestapo and Abwehr, word had spread that in just four months he had almost single-handedly dismantled the largest Allied espionage network: INTERALLIÉ.
His prominence as a super spy-catcher seemed most unlikely. He had been born in Tettnang, Germany, a small village on the northeast side of Lake Constance, five miles from the Austrian border and across the lake from Switzerland. His father owned a successful cycle shop and had encouraged Hugo to join the business. After graduating from the gymnasium, however, Hugo had other plans.
He tried to join the navy but failed due to poor eyesight. After that, he became a banker’s apprentice at a firm in nearby Ravensburg. During World War I, when Hugo turned eighteen in 1917, he was drafted into the German army as an infantry private and sent to the Western Front near the Somme. Almost immediately he was captured by the British and interned as a prisoner of war in a camp near Abbeville. Displaying uncanny skills, he escaped on four occasions but was recaptured each time.
Two years later he was repatriated to Germany and apprenticed with a Hamburg export company, working for them in Tetuan, Spanish Morocco, from 1925 to 1928. Promoted to senior clerk shortly thereafter, he returned to Hamburg.
“There had been nothing unusual about my life,” he recalled years later. “I was a business man and I liked my occupation. I had a steady income and a regular life, with a little villa just outside the city. My work kept me fully occupied. I had no time for political matters and it was always languages in which I sought to perfect myself. Although a South German, I was glad to live in Hamburg. It was a city of wide horizons and a pulsating life of its own with its many foreign connections. I felt at home there and my life seemed to lie in a well-regulated vista in front of me.”
The following summer, August 11, 1929, Hugo married and settled down to a homebody routine. Ten years later he and his wife, Lucie, had their first child, a son, and Hugo’s well-regulated vista seemed bright.
His sedate life took an abrupt turn, however, on August 20, 1939. Only twelve days before Germany invaded Poland, the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce placed a circular in the morning paper soliciting personnel with knowledge of foreign languages. Wartime censorship readers were needed, the advertisement said. Since the export industry would disintegrate during war, Hugo thought this would be a splendid opportunity and he applied.
For several months he heard nothing. Then, in November, he received military call-up papers indicating that he was to report to the Hindenburg barracks “for uniform.” Still thinking that he would be instructed in censorship, Hugo was perplexed when he was not only fitted for uniform but also given a pack, sidearm, steel helmet, and gas mask.
In December he was sent to Duisburg for training and told that he would be part of a secret police force working in the occupied countries of Europe. It all came too fast.
Was he a soldier or a policeman? he wondered. He had no qualifications for the duties and enjoyed no aspect of the work. But what else was he to do? It was wartime and he had to obey.
Before Hugo knew it he was part of the Geheime Feldpolizei and stationed in Caen, France. Here he was, an undercover cop who spoke French but had no training in police work, and he wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do. Caen had little need for occupation police, it turned out, so he was reassigned to Cherbourg, a hotbed of Allied espionage.
In October 1941 he was asked to interrogate a man who had been arrested as a suspected spy. The man turned out to be Jean Lucien Keiffer, code-named “Kiki,” an agent for a Resistance net operating out of Paris.
Kiki was in Cherbourg to find a patriotic fisherman who would act as a courier to England, he told Hugo. He stated that their network was called INTERALLIÉ and was run by a Polish captain and his French assistant. It was a large group—perhaps as many as one hundred agents—comprised mostly of freelance spies. Within hours, Hugo had convinced Kiki to work for him.
Such a fast turn seemed unthinkable, but occasionally happened. J. C. Masterman, chairman of the committee that supervised Britain’s double agents, explained the delicacy of the game: “Every spy who is sent into enemy territory must be alive to the possibility of capture and, in the event of capture, of saving his life not merely by full confession but by returning with messages couched in a form approved and perhaps dictated by his captors.”
Kiki had not been tortured, however, or even threatened with torture, but Masterman knew the type. While a majority of spies could commit treachery under pressure, he wrote in his final MI5 report, “there are others who have a natural predilection to live in that curious world of espionage and deceit, and who attach themselves with equal facility to one side or the other, so long as their craving for adventure of a rather macabre type is satisfied.”
Kiki was this type. His duplicity began by giving Bleicher the INTERALLIÉ headquarters address in Paris, which allowed Hugo to arrest its key leaders: Roman Czerniawski, Lily Carré, and Renée Borni. Bleicher immediately turned Carré and Borni, and, with Kiki, the trio assisted Hugo in the arrest of some sixty agents.
Sensing they had found a gifted agent, the Abwehr claimed Hugo for their own and relocated him to Paris; he was still part of the Geheime Feldpolizei, but would now operate under their supervision.
Administration of German law enforcement, intelligence, and counterintelligence was complicated, though, even for those in it. The Nazi Party, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, conducted all of these operations within the sister organizations Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Overlapping these same tasks, however, was the military’s Geheime Feldpolizei—Bleicher’s group—and the Abwehr’s counterintelligence division.
No love would be lost between the Nazis and the military.
Summoned to the Hôtel Lutétia, Hugo met his new boss, Colonel Oscar Reile, the agency’s counterintelligence head in Paris. A former chief of police, Reile was a prototype German officer: forty-six, intelligent, well groomed, and athletic. His speech was measured, slow, and direct, but he didn’t speak French—another reason he desired the services of Hugo Bleicher.
Hugo would be undertaking a new, broader assignment, Reile told him, arresting British spies and Resistance saboteurs throughout the country. “We are fighting against bitter enemies who do us immense damage,” he said. “It is our duty to fight them with every available weapon, but I want our methods to remain clean; for our coat must remain clean, too. No violence in interrogations, no third degree, which does not really produce good results. No threats, please, and above all no promises that cannot be kept.”
Hugo was fully aware that the instruction was to operate in a fashion exactly the opposite of the hated Gestapo, filled as it was with thugs and criminals. The Abwehr, as a military organization, expected discipline, civility, and professionalism.
With Bleicher’s INTERALLIÉ success, Reile gave him complete autonomy and access to agents and assistants as needed. Hugo could travel anywhere in the country, and did. His perfect French served him well; when traveling he was “Monsieur Jean,” and, if need be, he could converse in English
or Spanish.
Sergeant Hugo Bleicher (“Monsieur Jean”). WILLIAM KIMBER
Germany could not have found a better bloodhound. A fearless policeman with the cunning of Sherlock Holmes, Hugo was relentless in his work.
He was a worthy opponent for SOE’s best.
Throughout the fall of 1942, Bleicher paid careful attention to the Resistance groups growing along the Côte d’Azur—Nice, Cannes, and as far west as Marseille—and two events later that year greatly enhanced his work.
On November 11 Germany scuttled the terms of the 1940 armistice—which had allowed a “free” section of France (Vichy)—and declared all of the country occupied, with the southeastern portion to be governed by the Italians. All of France was now open game for arrests, and Hugo planned accordingly. He had heard that Resistance agents were regularly traveling by train from Marseille to Paris and alerted the Abwehr to be on watch.
Days later Marsac himself was making this very trip. Trains were the only way to travel any distance for most people and the crowd mitigated the risk for Resistance workers. Since food was rationed at a level of only 1,800 calories a day, the black market flourished. An allocation of only six and a half ounces of meat a week meant that people in the city would constantly travel to the countryside to bargain for beans, carrots, poultry, eggs, cheese, and beef. With papers in proper order to board, the danger was slight unless your name was on a list and there was a check of passengers at a stop.
Marsac’s papers were solid and he settled in for the long journey. In his briefcase next to him was Carte’s list of network agents, some of whom knew the SPINDLE trio and their hideouts.
The slow, mundane rocking of the train had the effect of a sedative, and after a while Marsac dozed off. When he awoke, he stirred.
The briefcase was gone.
CHAPTER 5
CONTROL
Marsac’s decision to carry incriminating evidence in his briefcase violated every rule of espionage. Spies generally carried no papers or even notes which would reveal their work. For SOE agents, communication with other operatives was accomplished by couriers, and wireless messages to and from London were disguised within codes. But Germany, too, had its code breakers and cryptographers, so any cables sent to Baker Street had to be well hidden within labyrinthine formulas.
